Is there a part on the Arduino Site that documents using the iscp or is it isp to upload to the board. I am looking to do this using an Arduino board I bought from sparkfun. I am hoping to get rid of the small wait time at the beginning of uploading. I have a home built parallel port programmer that I tried to use. I changed change: serial.download_rate=19200 to serial.download_rate=115200. Then, change upload.erase and upload.verify from false to true. And also changed upload.programmer=stk500 to dapa. No dice. One of the parts that seemed misleading is the # Documents and Settings -> Application Data -> Arduino -> preferences.txt (on windows). This file is not here. I searched and found only one preferences.txt file for arduino and it seemed to be the one telling me not to modify it.

I thought maybe it was some shoddy craftsmanship on the parallel programmer I made (although it bootloaded without a problem). So I purchased a AVR ISP from digikey (while I intended to buy one with a serial connection I ended up buying one with a usb connection (avr isp mkII)) but no luck so far and I'm confused. In searching the forum and pages I found metions of people using AVR Dude and using the isp but no clear explanations or documentation about it. (for example is it ISP or ICP or ISCP).

thanks ccdust. I'll try that........ but im still wondering about a "teach a man to fish" kind of answer. I feel tht alot of this stuff alternates between out of context single word answers or large books of documentation meant for people who have done this for years... Is there a way for someone to wrap their heads around this sort of thing...

i think the problem is that even if you select DAPA as a programmer you still need to pass it the name for the right parallel port while the arduino ide will let you select between serial ports....

in general when you use arduino to compile some code there will be an .hex file in thedirectory where the .pde file isyou can use and windows tool that came with AVRISP to upload this hex file to the board